Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy

I just finished reading these books (Red Mars, Green Mars,
and Blue Mars) and can't recommend them too highly.
Red Mars won the Nebula award in 1993, and Green
Mars and Blue Mars each won the Hugo award (in
1994 and 1997), and all were richly deserved.

I can't say I enjoyed these more than any other SF book I've
read recently (Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon wins that
award), but I found them perhaps among the most rewarding of
all the science fiction books I've ever read.

What is most remarkable about the books is the multiplex
layering--ideas, story lines, facts, visions of the
future. A story of the terraforming of Mars, this book
is also a love story for the geology and geography of a
planet and the slow succession of ecological progression, a
rich exploration of how people are changed by their
environment as they in turn change it ("We are areoformed as
we terraform Mars."), a wonderful, speculative exploration
of the science and technology that might be applied not only
to such a massive engineering project as the transformation
of a planet, but also the kinds of recreational technologies
such a culture might develop, and a thoughtful investigation
of politics and cultural evolution as a group of very smart
people are faced with the possibility of starting fresh.

I was reminded in some ways of Thomas Mann's The Magic
Mountain, not because of any particular ideas they have
in common, but because more than most novels, both are
dominated by conversation. The great shaping
conversation between preservationists (Reds) and
terraformers (Greens) is only the first of them. There
is a rich cast of characters, preserved for the entire saga
by the introduction of life-extension technology. (But
this is more than a plot device, as Robinson spends
considerable energy on the implications of extended
lifespans both in terms of individual human psychology, and
the "hypermalthusian" pressures on society.)

The books are a little slow at times (though at others quite
exciting, as we live through revolutions, natural disasters,
and wonderful, imaginative explorations of the planet's
surface), but it is the slowness with which you look at the
marvelous detail of a new world, seeing it with fresh eyes,
and wanting to absorb every detail.

The characters are rich and varied. No one is the
perfect hero. Instead, we explore the lives of a band of
brilliant iconoclasts, each flawed to a greater or lesser
degree, but each, through their interaction, driving the
history forward.

There is an enormous amount of truth and insight in these
books--psychological, political, and scientific. I love
some of the explorations of the psychology of growing old,
even as your body remains young. I loved the insights
into the way the Martian culture evolved. (It reminded me
of the remarks of Ed Anderson, a lawyer I know here in Santa
Rosa, who argues that the reason the American revolution
succeeded in a way that the French didn't is because of the
nearly 200 years in which the new land shaped the
expectations of a new people. He finds it ironic how
little time is spent in our history books studying the truly
formative period of our country's culture. When you're
out on your own, you do have a chance, and perhaps even a
requirement, to make things anew, and Robinson captures this
beautifully.)

I found a lot of food for thought regarding the idealism of
the open source software community--the belief of some
characters that a new order beyond capitalist competition
was possible, that the cooperative scientific and
engineering endeavor of Mars as a giant laboratory and
development for the good of mankind didn't have to fall back
into the old ways of exploitation and unequal distribution
of benefits. In many ways, the book is about a culture
built on the best of the underlying dreams of science, where
people are driven by the search for truth and possibility,
not personal gain. We must make a new world!

The writing is often beautiful, because so true. I
earmarked numerous pages because I wanted to go back and
read a line or a paragraph again. It's not florid,
passionate writing, but rather writing that is powerful
because it says something. For example:

"There was Jackie walking towards her.
There were some aides following some way back, but in front
it was just Jackie, coming towards her unseeing; then
seeing. At the sight of Maya a corner of her mouth
tightened, no more, but it was enough to allow Maya to see
that Jackie was, what, ninety years old? A hundred?
She was beautiful, she was powerful, but she was no longer
young. Events would soon be washing by her, the way
they did everyone else; history was a wave that moved
through time slightly faster than an individual life did, so
that when people had lived only to seventy or eighty, they
had been behind the wave by the time they died; and how much
more so now."

I won't finish the paragraph, since it reveals a bit of the
story that you don't want to know till you get there, but
that may be enough. The book is studded with thoughts
like that (that history is a wave that moves faster than our
individual lives, so that we get out of step with it as we
get older and the young start moving things in new
directions), expressed richly and out of the small details
of observation of characters and events rather than imposed
as a kind of narrative voice-over.

If you like science fiction (and maybe even if you don't,
but do have a tolerance for a fair amount of scientific
detail and speculation, or are just willing to work for a
book that rewards that work richly), I highly recommend this
trilogy. The New York Times Book Review called
it "a landmark in the history of the genre", and I couldn't
agree more. I will never think of Mars in the same way
again. I want to live for 250 years, engaged in a
great and transforming enterprise. And I want a
birdsuit!

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